But companies can do really bad things, and only a few people "get" it, so they keep doing it. It's very easy to confuse most people about technology, if that's what you're trying to do.
So Microsoft has to be self-policing if it's going to work. You can't rely on me to yell when you screw up -- I've learned when I do that, people paint me as some kind of nut, and then I don't get invited back. You know what I'm talking about. And I wasn't even criticizing Microsoft then, I was actually HELPING the company. You guys are very very sensitive.
There are all kinds of ways of marginalinzing ideas you don't want people to hear. Microsoft does it, every big company does. I don't believe the blogosphere is going to be a very good defense either. I have good examples of times the professional reporters did a better job of covering detailed technology than the blogs did.
The only way it can work is if Microsoft does something proactive, now, to make sure its committed to not screwing around. What that is, not sure. But first the will has to be there.
Dave Winer
· 3 years ago
BTW, I'm sure Ray Ozzie knows exactly what I'm talking about. Does Jim Allchin? Probably not. He's very selective about who he listens to. Same with Bill Gates. You know what I'm talking about there too. :-)
Adam Green
· 3 years ago
The E-word sure gets thrown around a lot. I'm not saying that Microsoft's strategy of cloning the minimal feature set is evil, but it sure is predatory, especially when combined with bundling. It makes good business sense for Microsoft to stop innovating once the air has been sucked out of an market niche, and the phrase "sucking the air out" is clearly identified with Microsoft. Don't tell me you never hear that at product meetings.
I agree with Dave that the IE7 preview is a wakeup call to the publishers of aggregators. In fact, they'd be much better off coming up with something else to do with RSS that goes way beyond aggregation. That was my basic point from the beginning.
Dave Winer
· 3 years ago
One more thing -- my aggregator is open source, so if you make a feature request you're not making it to me, you're making it to the world. If someone has the time and energy to write the code that connects NewsRiver to the Microsoft RSS platform, let me know, I'll coordinate, as best I can. To me, I won't do work that's specific to one platform. I learned that lesson a long time ago, when you get in the trunk, the very next thing that happens is that it gets closed, and locked, and pretty soon the air supply gets cut off. Been there done that got asphyxiated, lived to tell the tale. You have a lot of work to do before you get the trust of developers back. Don't take that personaly, just look at the name of the company on your paycheck.
danja
· 3 years ago
Instead of trade publications telling people what matters, we now have A-list bloggers (check memeorandum). There's been disintermediation, but the product placement's still there (check these comments).
Re. Adam's point: "coming up with something else to do with RSS that goes way beyond aggregation" - indeed. To some extent this has been happening, but it's not immediately obvious because the innovation is happening away from the A-list.
brian w.
· 3 years ago
Robert, it seems like in some cases the opposite is true... you say that if you dont work with the community, MS will fail. And if you dont have the best products, you will fail. I think some of the angst out there toward MS is the general feeling that even if you dont work with the community and even if you don't have the best products, you'll continue to not fail. I hope that's not the case in the long run, I hope you do fail if you dont work with the community. I hope the best products win, but it doesn't seem the case for now. I'm encouraged by the stuff coming from the IE team, but looking back over the past, you could say that despite having poor communication with the community and the crappy product that was IE 5 and 6, MS didn't lose. I guess what I mean to say is that people get angry with Microsoft because in the past, mediocrity has been enough to keep them as customers. They're stuck.
josephscott
· 3 years ago
The idea is nice, but it doesn't seem to reflect what we've actually seen from Microsoft. Even when MS does respond to the community it can often take years before anything is done. I'm sure several people will point out IE. How many years have people been begging for things to be fixed and updated? And we still only in beta for IE7.
Another example is PDF support in MS Office (which you pointed out). After reading through the details about that, it turns out the community had been requesting this for years:
The track record for MS listening to others doesn't leave most people with much hope.
Josh
· 3 years ago
I know that the world is becoming more connected, but I think you're applying geek connectedness to the whole world, which just isn't the case.
Yes, I use blogs, email, IMs etc. to keep up to date with things, and I generally know about new happenings fairly quickly. However, that doesn't mean that everyone does that, right?
If Microsoft does something stupid or evil, yeah, the geeks will know about it and not like it. They generally always have. Blogs and instant communication has just made it quicker.
However, the general mass of people who know Microsoft for Windows will still buy Windows and Microsoft products. Why? Because it's what they know. I think that ties in with what Brian said. Even if Microsoft doesn't work with 'the community' (which I assume means the tech community), the company still won't fail, because they have a big enough image with the non-tech audience to just keep going, even if the software they're producing isn't the best.
Innocent Bystander
· 3 years ago
Scoble says:
First, if we don’t work with the community we’ll fail. Second, if we don’t have the best products and services, we’ll fail. Third, if we take too long to react to market demands we’ll be left out of the conversation and rendered irrelevant.
--------
Hmm, IE 6 is the worst browser on the web, but remains dominant. You don't work with the standards community and are waaaaay out of conformance for stuff like CSS, and you've taken 6 years to improve it. IE's market share is beginning to slip a bit, but not nearly fast enough and IE 7 beta is still a trailing edge browser WRT HTML and CSS.
So I don't quite think you are right there. Apparently, network effects and inertia are still on your side.
Adam Green
· 3 years ago
Danny:
My Technorati rank is somewhere above 29,000, so I'm happy to listen to non-Alisters like myself. If you know about really cool RSS applications, please let me know and I'll write about them (adam AT darwinianweb DOT com). That goes for anyone else as well. I think RSS is the foundation of an entirely new infrastructure that will run parallel to the Web. Aggregation right now is like the Web before Mosaic (the first graphical browser).
Josh
· 3 years ago
The Innocent Bystander made an excellent point about IE6. Firefox is far better than IE6, but guess what?
IE6 still dominates. Why? Because that's what most people know.
Innocent Bystander
· 3 years ago
Hi Adam,
FYI, the first graphical browser was the first browser ever, it ran on NeXT machines (where the web was born).
I think the RSS reading experience in IE is poor precisely because of people like you and Dave Winer. Millions of people will now be introduced to RSS and view it as a poor cousin to "favorites/bookmarks" because we are worrying too much about pissing off developers of existing RSS readers and people like Dave Winer.
From my perspective, I think shipping a poor experience is worse than not shipping anything at all. Bah.
Dave Winer
· 3 years ago
Dare, that's baloney, please check with "Team RSS" inside your company and ask them what I said when I saw their feed reader last April (substantially the same software that shipped this week). And then it would be nice if you would retract that ridiculous statement.
danja
· 3 years ago
Sorry Dave, but your statement actually supports Dare's point. Their idea of working "closely with the community" (as you put it) was a private meeting with yourself.
/pd
· 3 years ago
I agree with Dare, just ship it !!
But theres a good question being placed out here. .how does on aggregator app know that I have read a feed on another aggregator ? Is there a method which indicates read status between the aggregators I use ??
Brian
· 3 years ago
Robert, what group do you work under? CorpCom? I think it might be useful for people both outside and inside MS to state/develop the current policies for development of products that impact developing standards.
I work for a large company and have seen groups develop their own "standard" simply because there was no clear policy on how things should be done.
The talk of "evil" is handy, but it's been my experience that well-meaning souls can go down dark alleys simply because they were trying to meet internal goals without adequate guidelines. I don't doubt this has been the cause of any number of MS missteps in the past...
Random J. Poster
· 3 years ago
Another vote for Dare. How come he's not a VP or something?
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
/pd: today the only synchronization system that's out and interesting is NewsGator's (they synch between all of the aggregators they own, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Web service, NewsGator).
IE 7 offers a platform that COULD synchronize aggregators, but only on a single PC (today). They are working on making a cross-machine synchronization like NewsGator too.
Attensa is working on a cross-machine synchronization API too.
But each of these efforts are silo'ed and aren't industry standards. It'll be interesting to see if one does become an industry standard. NewsGator is close (Dare's RSS Bandit supports NewsGator's method now too).
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Random J.: cause it takes committees a while to identify greatness.
Brian, I'm in the Platform Strategy and Evangelism group. The real problem (and cool thing too, depending on how you look at it) is that Microsoft isn't very centralized. It's like 100 companies under one roof. Sometimes even two or three of these "companies" are working on similar stuff and competing for resources and adoption.
Developing standards take meeting in committees. That slows everything down. Now that we're seeing imperitives to move faster there's pressure to focus less on standards and more on just shipping.
It's an interesting balance to watch.
Also, depends on the team. The IE team is doing a lot of work re-engaging with Web Standards bodies, for instance. You'll see a shift in IE 7 and an even more dramatic shift in IE 8 due to that work.
Innocent Bystander
· 3 years ago
>The IE team is doing a lot of work re-engaging with Web Standards bodies, for instance.
And they felt free to disengage because....?
I think MS should get out of the browser business, they clearly have no talent, interest, nor motivation to excel at it. Why else would they let that dog languish for 6 years?
Even now, the way that fixes are being deployed is stupid. According to the IE7 blog, fixes are only applied if the document is in strict mode. Otherwise you get IE 6 behavior.
Did you know that IE 6 uses a different (and ugly) stylesheet for strict mode and that many websites intentionally introduce errors to force quirks mode?
Now we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place - do we remove the errors to get IE 7 fixes and annoy IE 6 users, or just shuffle on with the patchwork of workarounds and hacks you've forced us to live with for so long?
Not cool.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
>Why else would they let that dog languish for 6 years?
Don't you remember a certain government telling us to make the market competitive again? That's exactly what happened.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
Don't cop-out on the DOJ, there are ways to make everyone happy, that's what companies should strive to do. And besides letting it slide, created the security nightmare we are all faced with daily, making spyware into a household word. And even if it was a political football hot-potato YOU won. Fight all that time for the 'right to innovate' and then when score touchdowns, give up?
Blame whomever and whatever, but that doesn't FIX it. IE is indeed a cancer.
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
Oh please Robert, it was the DOJ'S FAULT that IE didn't get updated for 6 years other than a neverending stream of security fixes?
If you don't know, just say, "I don't know", but there was NOTHING in the DOJ/Anti-Trust results that said "YOU MUST NOT TOUCH IE FEATURES FOR SIX YEARS".
That's just insulting our intelligence. We do in fact, check things out, even if it's you saying so. Especially if it's you saying so, as your record of "Post First, Fact Check Second, Apologize Third" is a regular 'feature'.
In general, posting things that say "I think you're so stupid that you'll believe any fool thing I tell you" is a bad idea.
Scott Royall
· 3 years ago
And I worry about Dave. Does he truly think Microsoft CAN dominate the Internet? It hasn't yet. XML? Microsoft thought it up, and look what Apple did with iTunes. Yes, by volume only, the most computers on the net are running Microsoft. So what? The Net is very anti-Microsoft in fact. Indeed, the Net is very opposed to any organization. So Dave, get over it.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
John: our executives made an explicit decision to not invest in IE after that. Also, former team members tell me they were totally demoralized after that decision came down and wanted to go ANYWHERE else but stay on the team that got the DOJ's focus on Microsoft.
It's interesting that you seem to know so many facts about the team. How many have you interviewed? How many do you know? Do you talk with the head of the Internet Explorer team often? I didn't realize you did.
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
Oh bloody wah Robert. You guys got caught doing things wrong and got spanked, and because the IE team felt all bad, they had a temper tantrum and screwed their users. What are you people, 12, and a buncha crybabies? Was the DOJ team lining you all up and hitting you in the face with a basketball while yelling "Come on crybaby, cry, come on, squirt a few, come on, cry for me" I somehow doubt it.
You stopped all development work on IE because someone hurt your feelings? Wow, it's a good thing it wasn't the Active Directory team. I'd love to see that press conference: Bill and SteveB all redfaced and teary, huffing, and yelling, "FINE! JUST....FINE! WE SEE HOW IT IS! We see! You hate us! We tried to be good to you, and you JUST DON'T CARE!! Well, you won't have Microsoft to push around anymore! We're LEAVING!! You just SEE how Linux and Apple treat you NOW!" Maybe some profanity yelled over their shoulders as they stomp off.
As Dennis Leary says, "Life's tough, wear a helmet"
As well, I didn't say a damned thing about the team, or how they felt. Frankly, I don't care. Their self-esteem is their problem, not mine, not the DOJ's. if they're so fragile that they, and the Board-level executives stop work on critical software every time someone criticizes it, then everyone involved in that decision was a bunch of crybabies, and need to suck it up. They didn't have a problem talking crap about Netscape when they were doing the deeds that got them in trouble. They didn't have a problem with trash-talking EVERYONE, even when they were blatantly lying. But now, deir feewings are awwl hurty? You want gouda or swiss with that whine?
Seems to me the Netscape/Mozilla people took the shots, hunkered down, and now we have Firefox. What's your friggin' excuse?
If you're going to dish it out, you're going to take it.
What I said was that there was nothing in the final decision that said MS was forbidden from updating IE to comply with current standards. There was nothing that said they are forbidden from doing the things that make sense.
Nice try to twist what I said, but again, unlike your opinion of your readers, I'm really not stupid. I'm well able to read what I wrote TWO POSTS UP from yours.
All Comments
So Microsoft has to be self-policing if it's going to work. You can't rely on me to yell when you screw up -- I've learned when I do that, people paint me as some kind of nut, and then I don't get invited back. You know what I'm talking about. And I wasn't even criticizing Microsoft then, I was actually HELPING the company. You guys are very very sensitive.
There are all kinds of ways of marginalinzing ideas you don't want people to hear. Microsoft does it, every big company does. I don't believe the blogosphere is going to be a very good defense either. I have good examples of times the professional reporters did a better job of covering detailed technology than the blogs did.
The only way it can work is if Microsoft does something proactive, now, to make sure its committed to not screwing around. What that is, not sure. But first the will has to be there.
I agree with Dave that the IE7 preview is a wakeup call to the publishers of aggregators. In fact, they'd be much better off coming up with something else to do with RSS that goes way beyond aggregation. That was my basic point from the beginning.
Re. Adam's point: "coming up with something else to do with RSS that goes way beyond aggregation" - indeed. To some extent this has been happening, but it's not immediately obvious because the innovation is happening away from the A-list.
Another example is PDF support in MS Office (which you pointed out). After reading through the details about that, it turns out the community had been requesting this for years:
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2005/10/02/ms-office-12-to-support-pdf/
The track record for MS listening to others doesn't leave most people with much hope.
Yes, I use blogs, email, IMs etc. to keep up to date with things, and I generally know about new happenings fairly quickly. However, that doesn't mean that everyone does that, right?
If Microsoft does something stupid or evil, yeah, the geeks will know about it and not like it. They generally always have. Blogs and instant communication has just made it quicker.
However, the general mass of people who know Microsoft for Windows will still buy Windows and Microsoft products. Why? Because it's what they know. I think that ties in with what Brian said. Even if Microsoft doesn't work with 'the community' (which I assume means the tech community), the company still won't fail, because they have a big enough image with the non-tech audience to just keep going, even if the software they're producing isn't the best.
First, if we don’t work with the community we’ll fail. Second, if we don’t have the best products and services, we’ll fail. Third, if we take too long to react to market demands we’ll be left out of the conversation and rendered irrelevant.
--------
Hmm, IE 6 is the worst browser on the web, but remains dominant. You don't work with the standards community and are waaaaay out of conformance for stuff like CSS, and you've taken 6 years to improve it. IE's market share is beginning to slip a bit, but not nearly fast enough and IE 7 beta is still a trailing edge browser WRT HTML and CSS.
So I don't quite think you are right there. Apparently, network effects and inertia are still on your side.
My Technorati rank is somewhere above 29,000, so I'm happy to listen to non-Alisters like myself. If you know about really cool RSS applications, please let me know and I'll write about them (adam AT darwinianweb DOT com). That goes for anyone else as well. I think RSS is the foundation of an entirely new infrastructure that will run parallel to the Web. Aggregation right now is like the Web before Mosaic (the first graphical browser).
IE6 still dominates. Why? Because that's what most people know.
FYI, the first graphical browser was the first browser ever, it ran on NeXT machines (where the web was born).
More info:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideW...
From my perspective, I think shipping a poor experience is worse than not shipping anything at all. Bah.
But theres a good question being placed out here. .how does on aggregator app know that I have read a feed on another aggregator ? Is there a method which indicates read status between the aggregators I use ??
I work for a large company and have seen groups develop their own "standard" simply because there was no clear policy on how things should be done.
The talk of "evil" is handy, but it's been my experience that well-meaning souls can go down dark alleys simply because they were trying to meet internal goals without adequate guidelines. I don't doubt this has been the cause of any number of MS missteps in the past...
IE 7 offers a platform that COULD synchronize aggregators, but only on a single PC (today). They are working on making a cross-machine synchronization like NewsGator too.
Attensa is working on a cross-machine synchronization API too.
But each of these efforts are silo'ed and aren't industry standards. It'll be interesting to see if one does become an industry standard. NewsGator is close (Dare's RSS Bandit supports NewsGator's method now too).
Brian, I'm in the Platform Strategy and Evangelism group. The real problem (and cool thing too, depending on how you look at it) is that Microsoft isn't very centralized. It's like 100 companies under one roof. Sometimes even two or three of these "companies" are working on similar stuff and competing for resources and adoption.
Developing standards take meeting in committees. That slows everything down. Now that we're seeing imperitives to move faster there's pressure to focus less on standards and more on just shipping.
It's an interesting balance to watch.
Also, depends on the team. The IE team is doing a lot of work re-engaging with Web Standards bodies, for instance. You'll see a shift in IE 7 and an even more dramatic shift in IE 8 due to that work.
And they felt free to disengage because....?
I think MS should get out of the browser business, they clearly have no talent, interest, nor motivation to excel at it. Why else would they let that dog languish for 6 years?
Even now, the way that fixes are being deployed is stupid. According to the IE7 blog, fixes are only applied if the document is in strict mode. Otherwise you get IE 6 behavior.
Did you know that IE 6 uses a different (and ugly) stylesheet for strict mode and that many websites intentionally introduce errors to force quirks mode?
Now we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place - do we remove the errors to get IE 7 fixes and annoy IE 6 users, or just shuffle on with the patchwork of workarounds and hacks you've forced us to live with for so long?
Not cool.
Don't you remember a certain government telling us to make the market competitive again? That's exactly what happened.
Blame whomever and whatever, but that doesn't FIX it. IE is indeed a cancer.
If you don't know, just say, "I don't know", but there was NOTHING in the DOJ/Anti-Trust results that said "YOU MUST NOT TOUCH IE FEATURES FOR SIX YEARS".
That's just insulting our intelligence. We do in fact, check things out, even if it's you saying so. Especially if it's you saying so, as your record of "Post First, Fact Check Second, Apologize Third" is a regular 'feature'.
In general, posting things that say "I think you're so stupid that you'll believe any fool thing I tell you" is a bad idea.
It's interesting that you seem to know so many facts about the team. How many have you interviewed? How many do you know? Do you talk with the head of the Internet Explorer team often? I didn't realize you did.
You stopped all development work on IE because someone hurt your feelings? Wow, it's a good thing it wasn't the Active Directory team. I'd love to see that press conference: Bill and SteveB all redfaced and teary, huffing, and yelling, "FINE! JUST....FINE! WE SEE HOW IT IS! We see! You hate us! We tried to be good to you, and you JUST DON'T CARE!! Well, you won't have Microsoft to push around anymore! We're LEAVING!! You just SEE how Linux and Apple treat you NOW!" Maybe some profanity yelled over their shoulders as they stomp off.
As Dennis Leary says, "Life's tough, wear a helmet"
As well, I didn't say a damned thing about the team, or how they felt. Frankly, I don't care. Their self-esteem is their problem, not mine, not the DOJ's. if they're so fragile that they, and the Board-level executives stop work on critical software every time someone criticizes it, then everyone involved in that decision was a bunch of crybabies, and need to suck it up. They didn't have a problem talking crap about Netscape when they were doing the deeds that got them in trouble. They didn't have a problem with trash-talking EVERYONE, even when they were blatantly lying. But now, deir feewings are awwl hurty? You want gouda or swiss with that whine?
Seems to me the Netscape/Mozilla people took the shots, hunkered down, and now we have Firefox. What's your friggin' excuse?
If you're going to dish it out, you're going to take it.
What I said was that there was nothing in the final decision that said MS was forbidden from updating IE to comply with current standards. There was nothing that said they are forbidden from doing the things that make sense.
Nice try to twist what I said, but again, unlike your opinion of your readers, I'm really not stupid. I'm well able to read what I wrote TWO POSTS UP from yours.